Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt

by Alexander at the World's End (lit)

  experience, however, he more than made up for in imagination. His book (and,

  therefore, Bias’ lessons) positively teemed with cunning schemes and devilish

  contraptions for winning wars at a stroke and bringing the boys home before

  harvest. There were ox-powered troop­ships and mechanical gadgets that hurled

  rocks, there were dastardly ploys for deceiving the enemy (unless, of course,

  they’d also read Aeneas’ book), there were stratagems and counter-stratagems and

  counter-counter-stratagems for the really advanced student. And, best of all,

  there were the bees.

  Oh, gods, the bees.

  Imagine you’re trapped in a city under siege, with seventy thousand men camping

  out under your battlements, vowing to slaughter every living thing inside the

  walls. They have archers and battering-rams and siege-towers, not to mention

  plenty of food and drink.You, on the other hand, have a first-generation copy of

  Aeneas the Tactician, so there isn’t anything to worry about really. Every day

  the enemy shoot and bombard and hammer away; you repel every attempt, sword in

  one hand and book of instructions in the other. Eventually, the enemy get

  depressed. Some of them start talking loudly about going home. Their general is

  getting worried, and consults his chief engineer.

  No problem, the engineer replies. We can’t climb over the walls or bash them

  down, so what we’ll do is we’ll dig a tunnel under the walls and then collapse

  it, bringing the walls tumbling down. The general smiles broadly and off the

  engineer goes, requisitioning buckets and organising shift rosters; and the next

  thing you know, your sleep is troubled by a sort of underground scratching

  noise, which is too loud to be cockroaches and too quiet for an earthquake.

  Just in time, you figure out what’s going on, and immediately consult The Book.

  Sure enough, there’s the answer. It’s wonderful. It goes like this.

  First, find out as best you can where the enemy tunnel is.Then, dig a tunnel of

  your own to intercept it. When you’re nearly through into the enemy’s main

  shaft, you stop and go round the city collecting up all the hives of bees you

  can possibly find, stunning the vicious little creatures by puffing smoke at

  them with a portable brazier and a pair of bellows. Then you take the hives of

  drowsy but evil-tempered bees down your tunnel, break through into next door,

  sling in the beehives and seal the hole up quick. In due course the bees wake up

  with a foul hangover and set about finding someone to blame for their injuries.

  Since ten standard beehives contain something of the order of five million bees,

  life in the enemy’s mines is likely to be unbearably exciting for quite some

  time. Once you’ve given your black-and­yellow-arsed allies a chance to do their

  stuff, you open the hole up again and flood the mines with smoke, enabling your

  men to get into the enemy’s diggings and cave in the tunnels, leaving them the

  whole lousy job to do again.

  I remember that the first time Eudaemon told us about this, I laughed so much I

  had to go outside and take deep breaths of cold night air to regain my

  composure, much to my brother’s irritation. What, he wanted to know, was so damn

  funny about a thoroughly ingenious, utterly foolproof military manoeuvre? I

  replied that if he couldn’t see the joke, I wasn’t going to be able to explain

  it to him, and we left it at that. I may even have apologised, under duress, for

  my lack of proper respect. Of course, the next time I came across Aeneas’ book —

  well, that’ll keep.

  So there we were, the sons of Eutychides, all apprenticed to our various

  vocations, all quietly chugging along with them to humour our father and not

  really giving much thought to the future. I knew, of course, that what I was

  learning from the illustrious Diogenes wasn’t, in purely commercial terms, worth

  spit. I assume Eudaemon realised the same thing, deep down in his liver, and the

  same for the others as they played at surveying or banking or trading in exotic

  spices. It didn’t matter really, because Father was fit and healthy and in due

  course we’d each marry a girl with enough of a dowry to make up the difference

  between our inheritances and what we’d need to bring in a decent living.

  Time passed, though, and one by one all the gullible heiresses in our part of

  Attica married other people. This was annoying; it meant that our brides would

  be from more distant regions, which would mean a lot of traipsing about the

  countryside going from holding to holding — five acres in Pallene, seven more

  out as far as Marathon maybe, two more over Phyle way; grandfather Eupolis’

  inheritance had been scattered enough as it was without the further headache of

  subdividing it and then matching up the bits with more far-flung snippets.

  Before you ask, there was no question of selling incon­veniently situated land

  and buying other land to take its place. In those days, that simply wasn’t done;

  it’d be like selling the members of your family you didn’t happen to get on with

  and buying someone else’s sweet-natured aunt. Land, after all, was for ever; it

  was people who came and went. It was thinking like this that made the relatively

  straightforward task of making a living in Attica such a complex and difficult

  matter, and led the Athenians as a nation to turn their back on self-sufficient

  agriculture and dabble in world domination instead.

  Came the time, however, when even the girls of our age in Acharnae and the back

  end of the Mesogaia were all married, but not to any of us. Naturally enough, we

  started to ask why. Generally speaking, Athenian fathers are only too delighted

  to get their daughters off their hands as quickly as possible, only just

  stopping short of giving them away, one free with every five jars of olives. It

  turned out, however, that my father, and our family in general, had acquired

  such an unhealthy reputation for eccentricity (because of my father’s knack of

  apprenticing his sons to world-famous dead­heads) that nobody wanted to know us,

  let alone marry into our obviously jinxed house. Perhaps it would have been

  different if my mother had been alive (she died when I was three). She’d been

  the daughter of a very prestigious and respectable family — you could tell how

  grand they were from the fact that most of them were in political exile at any

  given moment — and I’m sure her people’s solid reputation would have gone a long

  way towards undoing the damage. But once she died her family didn’t want to know

  us, so that was no help. And of course the more obvious it became that we

  weren’t going to be able to marry our way out of trouble, the more feverishly my

  father schemed and contrived to make sure we’d all be provided for. I tell you,

  he reminded me of a boy trying to untangle a ball of wool; the more he tugged

  and yanked at it, the tighter the tangles became, and the harder he pulled. It’s

  something of a miracle, in fact, that we managed to keep things together as long

  as we did.

  In the event, my father died as stolidly and disastrously as he’d lived. He was

  stung by a wasp during the olive harvest, and fell out of a tree. It was a />
  singularly fatuous way for him to die; there wasn’t any call for him to go

  shinning up trees at his age, but the slave whose job it was had bruised his

  knee and gone limping home, and Father was worried in case the wind blew the

  olives down (we were late with the olives that year, for some reason), leaving

  them on the ground, spoiling. So, being Father, he clambered up into the

  branches with his long stick for knocking the olives down, and he’d already

  cleared all the ones worth having; all that were left were a few small, hard

  specimens up in the high, thin branches, but (being Father) he was determined to

  show up the malingering slave by doing a thorough job. The wasp stung the back

  of his left hand, the one he was holding onto the branch with; I suppose he

  automatically let go, and went crashing down in a tangle of twigs and foliage,

  landing awkwardly and breaking his leg.

  Now, that wasn’t enough to kill him, Heaven knows; but he was alone out there,

  unable to move, with the sun setting, which meant that all our sensible

  neighbours had left the terraces and started home. And of course it would have

  to be the one night in the year when we had a freak rainstorm.

  Normally, of course, we’d have realised something was wrong when he failed to

  come home, and gone out to see what the matter was. But of course we had a house

  at Phyle (house is an over­statement; it had been a house back in Grandfather

  Eupolis’ day, but by that point it was four walls and a vague recollection of

  the shape of a roof, which we patched up with trimmings and branches whenever we

  had occasion to use it, for example during the olive harvest) and we naturally

  assumed that Father had decided to sleep there rather than trudge all the way

  back to Pallene.

  He was still very much alive the next morning, when our loath­some neighbour

  Demonax found him and (grudgingly, we assume) helped him down the hill to our

  roofless, tumbledown house. That, however, was the limit of neighbourly charity

  as far as Demonax as concerned; he had olives to get in, and if Eutychides was

  fool enough to go falling out of trees and breaking legs, he should be grateful

  for a shoulder to lean on as far as the house, where undoubtedly the slave or

  one of the maids would show up before noon. So he left him there, wrapped in his

  sopping wet cloak, either failing to notice or failing to care that Father was

  developing a rare old fever.

  Well, the slave with the bad knee tottered back up to the olive grove, saw that

  Father wasn’t there, assumed he’d gone home and set about getting in the rest of

  the olives. He knew he was in trouble for sloping off the previous day, and was

  anxious to regain a bit of lost favour by putting in a full day’s work. It was

  only by chance that he stayed so late at his work that he decided to stop over

  at the house himself; where he found my father, half off his head with fever,

  apparently having a heated argument with Grandfather Eupolis about the merits of

  Euripides’ play The Trojan Women.

  By this time, of course, it was too late in the day to think about trying to get

  him home, or even finding help. So Father had to spend the night there, with

  nothing to eat (the slave had only taken his own lunch with him, and of course

  he’d eaten that) and precious little in the way of warmth or comfort. As soon as

  it was light, the slave set off to find help. He made the mistake of hammering

  on Demonax’s door. Our neighbour replied that he’d already wasted enough

  valuable time larking about with the old fool, and he had better things to do,

  etc. By the time the slave gave up and left, encouraged on his way by Demonax’s

  two unspeakably ferocious dogs, it was already mid­morning, and by the time the

  slave had gone back home, found some­one who’d listen to him (my feckless

  brother Euthyphron; hardly the person you’d choose to turn to in a crisis),

  organised a makeshift litter and some bearers, and slogged back out to Phyle, it

  was dark again.

  By now Father was in terrible shape, so Euthyphron decided to take him home in

  the dark. I suppose it wasn’t his fault that it rained again; it rains so rarely

  in Attica that the risk was practically negligible. But he’d been going back and

  forth to Phyle since he was a little kid, he shouldn’t have got lost and spent

  the whole night wandering up and down, round and round in circles, until he

  finally blundered into the house at Pallene, soaked to the skin, about an hour

  before dawn.

  Even after all that, you’d have expected Father to pull through. True, he had

  dreadful congestion in his lungs by this stage, as well as the fever, but this

  was Attica , where as a rule people generally don’t die of a broken leg. We

  called for a doctor, and he came; a short, fat, busy little man from

  Halicarnassus who drained off an alarming amount of Father’s blood in a series

  of little bronze dishes while mumbling prayers to Asclepius in a sing-song voice

  that nearly drove me round the bend. His considered opinion was that the real

  cause of the illness was the wasp-sting. Some people, he said, react very badly

  to being stung, and that’s just how it goes. We pointed out that we kept bees,

  and Father had been stung more times than he’d eaten salted fish, but the doctor

  shook his head and said that bee-stings and wasp-stings had quite different

  effects and attacked different humours in the body. Then he siphoned off another

  jugful of Father’s blood just to be on the safe side, charged us a drachma, and

  went home.

  But we didn’t imagine for a moment that he was going to die; we knew he was very

  ill, but the worst we anticipated was the inconvenience of having to hang around

  the house listening to him argue (with incredible bitterness, most of the time)

  with the ghost of his dead father when we all had work to do. I suppose the

  apprehension set in when we realised that none of us knew how the estate, the

  family business, actually worked. Oh, we knew about its component parts, but

  Father had always kept a firm and exclusive grip on the overall management of it

  all, and we didn’t have a clue what needed to be done. Slaves and day-labourers

  kept turning up at the door wanting to be told what they should be doing, and we

  didn’t know. It was utterly thoughtless of Father, we told each other, to be

  lying there raving like a loon when there was so much work to be done that only

  he could do.We knew whose fault it would be when he recovered and found that

  everything was in a total mess; there’d be no point trying to explain...

  And then one of us raised the possibility — I don’t think anybody said it in so

  many words — of what would happen if he didn’t recover; what if he died, and

  left us all alone? At first that didn’t bear thinking about, and besides, he

  wasn’t going to die, so stop being so damn morbid. But time went on, and

  although his slanging match with our late grandfather grew steadily more

  vitriolic (we could only hear one side of it, of course, but we remembered

  Eupolis and were sure that at the very least he was giving as good as he got),

  his voice was getting steadily weaker. He didn’t recognise any of us, o
r even

  seem to be aware that there was anybody there except his own father. When he

  started telling the old man that it was his neglect and mental cruelty that

  killed our grandmother Phaedra, we were all so embarrassed we got up and left

  the room.

  He died on the seventh day of the fever, in the middle of a stream of abuse. It

  was the first time we’d ever heard him use that sort of language, or express

  himself so passionately about anything. In fact, after Grandfather died, I can’t

  remember Father ever mention­ing him (aside, of course, from this occasion) in

  anything except a vaguely respectful tone such as you’d use about some minor god

  you believed in but didn’t actually know very much about.

  Well, soon enough I expect to see him again — both of them, in fact

  — on the other side of the blind river, that drab and featureless place where we

  Greeks go when we die. I’ll be able to ask them both what it was that passed

  between them that was important enough to blot out everything else from Father’s

  mind in the last hours of his life. I’ve often speculated idly about what on

  earth it might have been. The prospect of satisfying my curiosity on this point

  is, in fact, about the only thing that reconciles me to the thought of death,

  which in all other respects has nothing to recommend it whatsoever.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A thenian children, my illiterate young friend, are plagued from their earliest

  years by the poet Homer. For reasons which I have never and will never

  understand, we’re required to learn vast acreages of his dreary masterpieces by

  heart, and anybody who can’t or won’t is immediately dismissed out of hand as

  perverse or just plain stupid. ‘Ignorant little ratbag, doesn’t even know his

  Homer,’ they say, and reinforce their reproof with the backs of their hands.

  Bizarre. After all, there’s nothing in the iliad and next to nothing in the

  Odyssey that’s of any practical value to anybody; quite the reverse, in fact.

  Four-fifths of the Iliad is endlessly repetitive battle scenes, describing a

  style of fighting that would get you killed in less time than it takes to blow

  your nose if you tried it on a modern battlefield, and the rest of it’s an

  extremely dubious, if not downright blas­phemous, take on the lifestyle and